Mother of James Foley embodies grace in new book ‘American Mother’

Diane Foley remembers the moment she got the call: Would you like to sit down with one of the men involved in your son’s death?

“I knew I wanted to meet him,” she says in a video call. “I had no doubt. I knew Jim would not have wanted me to be afraid, and that Jim would have wanted me to hear his side of the story.” 

Her son, James Foley, was an American journalist taken hostage in 2012 while reporting in northwestern Syria. After 22 months in captivity, he was beheaded by the Islamic State group (ISIS).  

“American Mother” opens with the extraordinary meeting between Mrs. Foley and Alexanda Kotey in 2021. The nonfiction book, written by Irish novelist Colum McCann with Mrs. Foley, chronicles her son’s life and reporting. He was embedded with troops during the United States’ post-9/11 conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was detained in Libya for 44 days during the regime of Muammar Qaddafi.

The book captures the family’s trepidation as Mr. Foley returned to the front lines, and the haunting fear they endured after learning he had been captured again. But the book’s most poignant moments, paradoxically, center on silence – the months that unfolded in which no news surfaced from Syria, and barely any support came from the State Department or the White House, according to those involved. 

From that void emerged Mrs. Foley’s faith and her determination to bring her son home. Those qualities movingly paralleled Mr. Foley’s resolve in captivity, as conveyed later by fellow hostages who survived the experience, including one who memorized a nine-paragraph letter written by Mr. Foley to his family. Mrs. Foley continued to let that determination fuel her in the months and years after he was killed, working to drive changes in U.S. hostage policy and support the families of other Americans held overseas.

“What I want is people to feel what she felt, to understand why she does what she does, and to understand the pain of everything that she went through and how she’s learned to turn this grief into something really powerful,” Mr. McCann says. “Nobody else has changed the landscape of American politics in relation to hostage-taking and wrongfully detained people as much as Diane Foley has.”

Mrs. Foley allows readers into intimate moments, like her challenging conversations with then-President Barack Obama, and the phone call with an emotional reporter who told her to look at Twitter (where news of her son’s killing was circulating). But the meetings with Mr. Kotey, the captured ISIS militant who participated in Mr. Foley’s hostage-taking, best reveal Mrs. Foley’s depth of humanity.

“I wanted to try to build a bridge,” Mrs. Foley says. “I prayed to try to see him as a human being, a young man about the same age as one of our sons.”

The conversations were challenging. Mr. Kotey, who at the time had pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to multiple charges related to hostage-takings and beheadings in Syria, was opaque on many topics. The British-born ISIS fighter disclaimed any involvement in Mr. Foley’s murder. (He is serving a life sentence in a federal prison for his involvement in the abduction and death of four hostages, including Mr. Foley.) He expressed remorse not for his actions but for the Foley family’s resulting ordeal.

Mrs. Foley persisted, though, returning to meet with him once more in 2022, probing him for a semblance of reflection. It’s telling how patiently she engaged, searching for a reason to keep seeking this connection. 

“This is about the complications of being a mother,” says Mr. McCann, who joined Mrs. Foley for her meetings with Mr. Kotey. “This is a woman who sits down with her supposed enemy, the killer of her son, and says, ‘Let’s talk. Let’s try to understand each other. Because nothing will ever become good if we don’t try to understand each other.’”

The book crosses a threshold for Mr. McCann, best known for his work in fiction, including his National Book Award-winning “Let the Great World Spin.” Mr. Foley was once photographed reading it, one of many signals the writer says drew him to the family’s narrative.

“It picked me,” he says of the story. “The more I got into it, the more I felt that fate coincided with Diane’s faith, and that we were sort of destined to do this work together.”

Mr. McCann got his start writing for newspapers as a teenager in Dublin. That background helped him tap into Mr. Foley’s sense of purpose.

“He went in with that old dictum that John Berger talked about: ‘Never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one,’” Mr. McCann says. “He knew that the story of the wars that were going on had to be told from different angles.”

For Mrs. Foley, working on the book with Mr. McCann felt fitting. “One of the reasons Colum was able to capture the story so well is because he was like Jim in a lot of ways,” she says. “He knows how to tell a good story, and he knows how to listen well and is curious, like Jim was.”

The experience of writing it, she adds, lessened some of the silence she endured from 2012 to 2014. “I didn’t really know the man he became,” she says of her son. “It’s through the stories of others who knew him, kids whom he taught or other people, other journalists, and then finally the hostages he was with. It’s through those people we’ve come to know Jim.”

“American Mother” hits bookshelves at a time when understanding the experience of those held captive is a matter not only of empathy but also of public policy. Mrs. Foley continues to champion the issue through the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which advocates for American hostages abroad and benefits from the book’s proceeds.

“There was no one to help us,” Mrs. Foley says. “So I’m hoping that some of Jim’s legacy is some positive change. Since his murder in 2014, more than 100 innocent Americans have come home. And that gives me great joy. More and more aspiring journalists are learning how important safety is. A lot of those things keep Jim alive for me.”